Numbers That Tell the Same Story: Redundancy in education statistics

The publication of statistics for K-12 education is superfluous, for we already know what the numbers will say. They will say that African-, Latino, and Native-American students do not perform as well as Caucasian- or Asian-American students.

Here is an excellent case in point: Frontline, a PBS public affairs series, reported in June 2012 that graduation rates for a “black, Hispanic [sic] or American Indian [sic] teenager” hover around 65 percent. [1] By comparison, 82 percent of “whites” and 92 percent of “Asian/Pacific Islanders” graduate from high school. [2]

Baldly, these statistics show that a definitive caste system continues to exist in American public education: Asian and whites or whites and Asian at the top of the achievement pyramid; blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans (in no particular order) occupy the lower orders.

If we go back a century, then we find blacks in public schools being shepherded into a curriculum of domestic and industrial training, for girls and boys, respectively. Sustained and even heated debates took place in Philadelphia, Indianapolis, and Chicago between black citizens and white school officials over whether vocational education should be mandatory for black children.

In both Indianapolis and Philadelphia, for example, vocational training stretched from high school down into the elementary grades by 1920. [3] This practice roiled W. E. B. Du Bois, arguably the staunchest and most eloquent proponent of a “classical” education for black students. He argued that “no nation as rich and as enlightened as the United States could afford” to limit the education of blacks in the primary grades to cooking, sewing, and handicrafts, as opposed to reading, writing, and ciphering. [4]

Throughout the 1920s and beyond, intelligence tests, coupled with guidance counseling, ushered in a new era of public schooling nationwide, one in which a hierarchy of curriculum was instituted. [5] This curricular hierarchy mirrored the hierarchy of the social order, which fitted workers into discrete slots based upon putative mental levels: professional or business, clerical, skilled trades, semi-skilled trades, and unskilled labor. {6]

As par for the course, blacks and others comprising the “great army of incapables in the school” were discouraged and steered away from the classic curriculum that included learning how to read, write, and perform basic mathematical calculations. [7]

What’s more, the new philosophy that was actuating “the work of the school” [8] consisted of producing “docile and moral citizens.” [9]

Today’s pundits, parents, and policymakers who voice concern about the lack of wholesale improvement in graduation rates and academic achievement for America’s students must understand that, for nearly a century, the advertised purpose of public education has been to manage “underprivileged” students (regardless of ethnicity), not to educate or graduate them!